Paris Conservatoire Contest Pieces

The Paris Conservatoire’s annu­al con­cours (con­test) has added a great num­ber of solo works to the bassoon’s reper­toire. Dur­ing the first cen­tu­ry or so of the Conservatoire’s exis­tence, the pieces for the com­pe­ti­tion were most­ly writ­ten by the bas­soon pro­fes­sors (Wil­lent-Bor­dog­ni, Cokken, Jan­court, etc.). But dur­ing the peri­od 1898–1984, the Con­ser­va­toire had a pol­i­cy of com­mis­sion­ing new works from estab­lished com­posers in most years.

The table below is a list of the known bas­soon con­cours pieces for the years 1824–1984 (pieces for the years 1825–1834, 1837–1839, 1871, and 1920 weren’t record­ed). Except for a cou­ple of minor details I added, all of this infor­ma­tion is tak­en from Kris­tine Klopfen­stein Fletcher’s book, The Paris Con­ser­va­toire and the Con­test Solos for Bas­soon (Bloom­ing­ton, IN: Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1988). This is one of the great bas­soon ref­er­ence works, but it has long been out of print and copies are hard to come by today. The sim­ple list below pro­vides only a small frac­tion of the wealth of infor­ma­tion in Fletcher’s book—seek out a copy of it in a uni­ver­si­ty library if you want more details about the Con­ser­va­toire, the con­cours, or any of the indi­vid­ual works or com­posers. For infor­ma­tion about the con­cours for the years 1985–2004, see Jef­frey Lyman’s arti­cle “The Morceaux de Con­cours for Bas­soon Since 1984: A Parisian Tra­di­tion Con­tin­ues,” in The Dou­ble Reed, Vol­ume 28, no. 2 (2005).

Some notes on this list:

I’ve pro­vid­ed links for pieces which are down­load­able from IMSLP. I’ve uploaded a few pieces myself, and will con­tin­ue to hunt for copies of oth­ers that are in the pub­lic domain. I’ll try to keep on top of adding new links as more pieces are added — please let me know if you add one of the miss­ing pieces to IMSLP.

The table is sortable by any col­umn (pro­vid­ed you have Javascript enabled). Click a col­umn head­er to sort by that field.

Works com­mis­sioned specif­i­cal­ly for that year’s con­cours are marked with a dag­ger (†).

Begin­ning in 1970 a sec­ond piece, usu­al­ly a stan­dard of the reper­toire, was required each year. I’ve split each of those years into two rows (e.g. 1970a and 1970b) so that the list will remain entire­ly sortable.